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Content Management Systems

A blog is traditionally just a website with a selection of recent articles on the main page and links to chronologically-sorted articles in a sidebar. Blog authors and administrators usually create content and manage the site through a web browser instead of a dedicated desktop application.

Programmers of blog software soon discovered that it made sense to add other criteria for sorting, such as tags and categories. Also, some items of content made more sense as hierarchically organized pages. No longer limited to just simple articles with titles, blogs can now even facilitate posting of custom structured content types, such as status updates, asides, FAQs, how-tos, gallery posts, recipes, reviews, video diaries, etc.

If a site calls itself a blog, site visitors expect to have the option to interact with the post authors and/or other site visitors via a comment system.

A site powered by a blog content management system can be indistinguishable from one driven by an enterprise content management system, and the answer to “what’s a blog?” becomes more nebulous.

How do I get a blog?

Please read the instructions on our Request a Site page. We sup­port web­sites related to teach­ing, research, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion out­reach for fac­ulty projects and officially recognized Uni­ver­sity groups and pro­grams.

Through special arrangement with Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, the blog service is available to all officially recognized student organizations and publications, including those sponsored by ODUS, ORL, and PACE. ODUS serves as both the primary administrative contact and support conduit for student organizations that may desire a blog site.

It is against University policy to collect ad revenue (affiliate programs, Adsense, or other pay-per-click services) from pages served off of University servers. An externally hosted solution is the best option for organizations that wish to generate money from their websites.

OIT Academic Services will set up a WordPress blog under blogs.princeton.edu for a course at the request of the instructor. However, the self-service interactive tools built into Blackboard 9.x might be, in some cases, a more desirable option for course blogs.

While the native Blackboard blogs are easy to use and integrate with the Grade Center, they lack the functionality, extendability, and customizability that the WordPress blogs offer. The Blackboard-integrated WordPress blog set-up is automated by the instructor clicking the “Blogs (WordPress)” link in the Tools area of the course. These blogs are private, with access limited to course membership.

A key difference between the platforms is privacy. Access to Blackboard blog content is restricted to instructors and students enrolled in a course. This also applies to the Blackboard-integrated WordPress blogs. While it is possible to manually restrict access for blogs.princeton.edu content to a members-only group, there is no direct integration with enrollment data for these blogs.

Mov­able Type to WordPress

The WordPress platform is a stable, innovative publishing system with a vast library of third-party plugins and themes. It powers over 74 million websites, driving at least 18.9% of the web. An expansive, vibrant community of WordPress users and developers are continually improving the software, offering support, writing tutorials, and sharing best practices. We look forward to fostering an active community of WordPress users within Princeton.

We shut down the Movable Type server on January 28, 2015. Abandoned blogs were deleted, while other sites were either migrated to WordPress, migrated to a third-party platform, or archived to static websites.

WordPress environment

The University purchased a site license for the entire Lynda.com online training library, which includes over 20 hours of WordPress 3 training. Visit lynda.princeton.edu and log in with your Princeton net ID to access their library from anywhere.

We also have a University-wide license for Safari Books Online. This service has at least a dozen books dedicated to WordPress 3.

This website, blogs.princeton.edu, will be a resource for training materials that are specific to our environment, including plugin-specific tutorials.

The production WordPress servers are locked down, secure environments.

Web Development Services tests all themes and plugins for security problems, compatibility problems, user experience issues, and performance issues before deploying them to the live servers.

With over 16,000 plugins and 1,400 themes on WordPress.org alone, not all of them play nicely with each other or with the latest version of WordPress. Not all are designed for a multisite environment, and some can kill performance on high traffic servers.

WordPress, itself, and all plugins and themes are uploaded to a separate version-controlled repository, then deployed via scripts to the QA and production web servers. This allows us to roll back to a previous version of the environment with a single command if we discover a problematic plugin or theme.

We tried to mimic many of WordPress.com’s features, and we have added many other plugins based on early feedback.

To simplify the interface for casual users, not all plugins are activated across the network. Site administrators can activate certain plugins just for their site. These include a Poll/Survey plugin, an FAQ plugin, and a LaTeX plugin.

We welcome suggestions for added functionality and new themes to add to our WordPress environment. Please use the Contact link above.

As long as your site is active and does not violate University policies, we will continue to host your site. However, if your site has been inactive for three (3) years, we reserve the right to remove your site from our servers.

We ask that each site request designates an administrative contact and a technical contact. These designated individuals become the site owner(s). Before deleting an inactive site, we will attempt to contact a site owner. If none of the designated site owners are still with the University, we will contact another individual within the administrative contact’s former department. If your site has a sponsor organization, such as the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students or Princeton in Asia, we will also coordinate with that organization.

With the site owner, we will discuss options for archiving an inactive site’s content before removing it from our servers.